Abstract: This work assesses the potential capability of the next generation of
high-precision Radial Velocity (RV) instruments for Earth-twin exoplanet
detection. From the perspective of the importance of data sampling, the Terra
Hunting Experiment aims to do this through an intense series of nightly RV
observations over a long baseline on a carefully selected target list, via the
brand-new instrument HARPS3. This paper describes an end-to-end simulation of
generating and processing such data to help us better understand the impact of
uncharacterised stellar noise in the recovery of Earth-mass planets with
orbital periods of the order of many months. We consider full Keplerian
systems, realistic simulated stellar noise, instrument white noise, and
location-specific weather patterns for our observation schedules. We use
Bayesian statistics to assess various planetary models fitted to the synthetic
data, and compare the successful planet recovery of the Terra Hunting
Experiment schedule with a typical reference survey. We find that the Terra
Hunting Experiment can detect Earth-twins in the habitable zones of solar-type
stars, in single and multi-planet systems, and in the presence of stellar
signals. Also that it out-performs a typical reference survey on accuracy of
recovered parameters, and that it performs comparably to an uninterrupted
space-based schedule.